Tilt-A-Whirl: The Education of an Erstwhile Carnie

A recent college graduate, Matt Miller, takes a summer job on the carnival, hoping to make a large sum of money in a short amount of time. On the road, he runs afoul of Butz, a tough, ruthless carnie whose profits he is cutting into. Over the summer, their rivalry grows increasingly dangerous for Matt, but he carries on mainly because of his romance with Veronica Burns, a young carnie with a reputation as a troublemaker. The conflict with Butz comes to a head at the final show of the year: The Michigan State Fair, surrounded by the poorest neighborhoods of Detroit, where a riot breaks out and threatens Matt’s life.

The story is told by an older Matt, reflecting on what the carnival taught him and how it changed his worldview. At its core, Tilt-A-Whirl is a tale of awakening, a lesson on trust, and a study of the ubiquitous art of the grift.

Coming in the fall of 2024

How the Big Fish Eat the Little Fish

Poverty, by America

Matthew Desmond

I thought I knew something about poverty in America, but it turns out I knew nothing. I don’t know why I had this illusion. I did live on about $500 a month while writing my first novels in south Minneapolis, and I met plenty of struggling people traveling with a carnival for two summers. I think most of us have our own preconceived notions about poor people, but they don’t come from direct experience but from a set of assumptions we get from the news, TV, movies, and books. And like many such assumptions, most turn out to be false.

…poverty is the dream killer, the capability destroyer, the great waster of human potential.

Desmond’s main point is that poverty is not just a lack of money – more fundamentally, it’s a lack of choice. And where people lack choice, they become desperate and ripe for exploitation. Poverty is not just a problem for the poor, it’s a problem for all of us. Because the sad truth is that we all all benefit from poverty in many invisible ways – whether from lower prices, safer neighborhoods, or higher profits from our investments.

Consider these facts in the book.

• In 2015, Walmart tried to raise its wages from $9 to $12 an hour. Investors worried about lower profits and dumped the stock. Not only did Walmart cancel the raise, but investors sent a powerful message to other companies – don’t raise your wages or we’ll tank your stock. 


• Payday lending institutions give companies a license to steal from the poor. The Annual Percentage Rate in many states runs over 500% a year, trapping people in a never-ending cycle of spiraling interest, extra charges, and fees. Traditional banks also profit from the exploitation. They make loans that keep payday companies in business, and so they share in the profits – as do those of us who own bank stocks.


• When President Clinton replaced traditional welfare with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in 1996, the states were charged with distributing the funds – and they steal them for other programs. In 2020, poor families received only 22 cents of every budgeted dollar of TANF funds.


• Landlords make more money per tenant in poor neighborhoods than middle-class and upscale neighborhoods. Why? Because mortgages and property taxes are cheaper in poor areas, but their rents are only slightly lower. Poor people are often desperate for housing and may have bad credit or an eviction in their past, and landlords take advantage of this by jacking up the rates.


• We subsidize affluence more than we do poverty. We allow corporations to offshore income and cheat on their taxes. We give them loans, grants, and lucrative government contracts, and we bail them out when they fail. 


• The top 20% of Americans get six times the tax breaks than the bottom 20%.


• Most of us receive more from the federal government than we pay in taxes. In 2018, the average middle-class family received $7,100 more in benefits, among them, disability and unemployment checks, home mortgage and other tax deductions, and benefits received from employee-sponsored health plans (which employers deduct from their federal income taxes).


• Whether you get a tax break or a welfare check, the result is the same – cash in the bank. We view tax breaks as acceptable and welfare checks as shameful, but in the end, they are one in the same.


• If you include all the tax breaks and government payments that Americans receive, we all end up paying about the same percentage in taxes: poor and middle-class families pay 25% and rich families pay around 28%. 


• American families who receive government assistance spend a larger share of their income on housing, food, entertainment, alcohol, and tobacco than other families.


So do we have any solutions for this devastating social problem – one that leads to crime, addiction, homelessness, broken families, and deaths of despair? Desmond suggests many practical ways to attack poverty, but perhaps none is so important as having a realistic view of the problem and the role we all play in it. To list those solutions would take up too much space in this short review, so I’ll leave you with a relevant quote from the end of the book.

“Every person, every company, every institution that has a role in perpetuating poverty also has a role in ameliorating it. The end of poverty is something to stand for, to march for, to sacrifice for. Because poverty is the dream killer, the capability destroyer, the great waster of human potential. It is a misery and a national disgrace, one that belies any claim to our greatness. The citizens of the richest nation in the world can and should finally put an end to it. We don’t need to outsmart this problem, we need to outhate it.”

Who Owns What, and Why?

How We Distribute Wealth in Society

Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, and Communism Revisited

The Competitive Trap

Throughout history, the simple answer to the question of who owns what, and why has been competition. The strongest, smartest, and, yes, the luckiest, have always enjoyed an abundance of wealth and its byproducts: security, freedom, and pleasure. The weakest in every society have always suffered from a lack of these.

History can be viewed almost exclusively through the lens of competition. Nearly everything in life must be competed for: a good job, promotions, a desirable mate, a house or apartment, admission to college, popularity in one’s social circle, or even little things like a parking place or a spot at the head of a line.

In prehistoric times, competition worked well for humanity. It culled defects from the gene pool and, later in our history, motivated us to excel, leading to greater advances in agriculture, industry, technology, and countless other facets of life. Cream, as they say, rises to the top, and in a highly competitive system, the best and the brightest are free to exercise their talents to advance civilization further and faster.

Throughout history, the simple answer to the question of who owns what, and why has been competition.

Another advantage of competition is its self-regulating nature. No stifling regulations needed. No futile attempts at universal consensus. No ambiguous questions about what’s fair and what’s not. As Johnny Depp says in Pirates of the Caribbean, “The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do.”

But that brings up the obvious dark side. Ethics are frequently left out of the equation. Winners need not be decent people, and we often respect them whether they earned their success honestly or, like pirates, they lied, cheated, and stole their way to riches. The cream may rise to the top, but so does the scum.

The competitive model likewise impels us to vilify the losers. People who repeatedly lose out in life’s challenges are lazy, stupid, or fatally flawed and not the victims of adverse circumstances or bad luck. We have accepted a modern, warped form of Calvinism, in which the winners confirm their salvation by succeeding, while the losers earn their place in hell by failing.

We have accepted a modern, warped form of Calvinism, in which the winners confirm their salvation by succeeding, while the losers earn their place in hell by failing.

For this reason, economic systems based on competition must lead to a breakdown in morals. If the wealthy can break the law and feel righteous while the poor live in self-induced misery, then society has no rules except to win, and only the timid and the naïve will follow the law.

On the global scale, competition is equally problematic. As populations increase, whole countries are caught up competing for dwindling resources, increasing the likelihood of conflict and war. Most of history can already be seen in terms of this struggle, with one country attacking its neighbor for land, food, minerals, and other essential commodities. And as resources dwindle, the struggle will only worsen.

The Failure of Political Systems

You might argue that we already have a solution to many of these problems – government. The first governments arose eight thousand years ago when people agreed to give up certain freedoms to live together peaceably under a common set of rules. The social contract that we signed not only led to the overall advancement of humanity but to a dramatic decline in human suffering.

Unfortunately, most early governments devolved into monarchies, aristocracies, or tyrannies. Eventually, more equitable forms of government evolved. Chief among them were democracy, socialism, Marxism, and Communism.

For various reasons, I am skeptical of all four.

The first governments arose eight thousand years ago when people agreed to give up certain freedoms to live together peaceably under a common set of rules.

The problem with democracies is that virtually all of them are capitalistic. Whether it’s the New Deal capitalism of the 1930s or today’s shareholder capitalism, competition is still the primary mechanism for distributing wealth. And as Thomas Piketty demonstrated in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, capitalism always leads to inequality, because the yearly return on capital always exceeds the increase in wages earned by workers, and most of the capital in our societies is owned by a small percentage of people. This premise is borne out by history – every capitalist society winds up with a rich minority, a struggling middle class, and a poor majority. These disparities existed even during the most progressive polices of the New Deal era.

The opposite of Capitalism is Communism, which relies entirely on the government to distribute wealth. So far, such governments have little to show for themselves. Not only do they stifle individual ambition, but they centralize power in the hands of tyrants or party officials who wind up repressing, instead of helping their citizens.

Marxism is perhaps the noblest in theory, striving for a classless society to provide goods and services “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Unfortunately, Marxism doesn’t specify a practical form of government, and in every case that I know of, it has devolved into a form of tyranny.

Socialism occupies a middle ground. While the least offensive of the four, it too has problems. Socialist governments are still capitalistic, leaving them vulnerable to spiraling inequality. They also diminish the rewards for individual effort, create a stifling bureaucracy, and put the state in charge of decisions that many people consider personal. The last objection is especially problematic in America, where the aversion to socialism is great. For that reason alone, its acceptance in this country is a non-starter.

The Underlying Power of Culture

If governments can’t solve the problem of wealth distribution, what can?

Perhaps the most important contributor to any government’s success is the culture that underlies it. Governments are based on the values of society and not the other way around. If those values change, it stands to reason that our governments will too.

What I’m suggesting is a co-operative, rather than a competitive set of values. Any society that extols the rugged individual striving heroically to reach the top more than a group of people working together to reach a common goal will always be at war with itself.

I would go even further and assert the desire for extraordinary wealth is a defect rather than a virtue. As Ragnar Lothbrok said about power in Vikings, “It attracts the worst and corrupts the best. It is only given to those who are prepared to lower themselves to pick it up.” You can replace the word “power” with “wealth,” because in today’s world they are the same.

Taking the long view of history, most of the world’s true progress has come from the contributions of the many and not the outstanding efforts of the few.

Taking the long view of history, most of the world’s true progress has come from the contributions of the many and not the outstanding efforts of the few. We tend to remember the Einsteins, Edisons, and Lincolns without considering the historical circumstances that enabled them to make their contributions, and we assume, wrongly, that had they died in childhood, no one else could have duplicated their achievements.

A hundred people will always accomplish more than one, no matter how talented that one person is. In our current culture, we like to focus on the high-risk, low-return gambles while neglecting the low-risk, high-return efforts that historically have proven to be our surest path forward. Co-operation has always been an essential feature of humanity, and we rely on it in countless ways to maintain and build our communities.

• Professional associations, leagues, and bureaus

• Mentoring and team-building programs

• Clubs and fraternal organizations

• Volunteerism and charity

• The nuclear and non-nuclear family

• Scientific and cultural sharing

• Business co-operatives

• Unions

• Churches and other religious institutions

Clearly, the culture is already there. It’s more a matter of emphasis, myth-making, or public relations. If we begin to see co-operation as a source of strength instead of weakness, we can do much to improve our lives. United we stand, divided we fall was the foundation on which our nation was built. That foundation has been badly fractured, but if we embrace the rights and needs of the many over the few, we will change the policies of our extraordinarily wealthy country and ensure that our future is more peaceful, just, and prosperous for all.

Can America Survive?

Or is it already broken beyond repair?

Two nations, divisible, with liberty and justice for some

Six years ago, these headlines would have sounded like a science-fiction movie. Yet with every passing year, we seem to be creeping closer to this unimaginable reality. And the pace is accelerating. What are the odds that the United States of America survives its current state of dysfunction and division?

I put the odds around 50/50.

If you think I’m unduly pessimistic, I invite you to look at two facts about how our country is changing. These are not red-state or blue-state talking points. They are clear and present realities.

1.  Changing demographics

Whether or not you believe in the Great Replacement Theory – the supposed plot to replace white Americans with minorities and immigrants – the racial and cultural makeup of the country is rapidly changing. White birth rates continue to decline, while the birth rate of immigrants and minorities continues to rise. In 2022, the majority of Americans under the age of 18 are already non-white. The future is already written.

Republicans know these changes spell trouble for their party. Immigrants and minorities tend to dislike the GOP and vote Democratic. Just as troubling for Republicans, their base of white voters is rapidly aging. Young people, taken as a whole, disdain the GOP, and as older voters slip into the sunset, younger voters are replacing them. This spells serious trouble for Republicans. In raw numbers, their base of support of steadily declining, with no end in sight.

2.  The changing balance of power

While the number of Republicans is declining, their power is growing. There are two main reasons for this. First, is the peculiar nature of the constitution. Second, is the willingness of Republicans to used scorched-earth policies to seize and hold on to power.

If you look at every branch of government today, the Constitution gives Republicans a leg up. Because every state – regardless of its population – has two senators, Republicans states with small populations can wield outsize control, and even dominate, in the Senate. The Electoral College also favors small Republicans states, granting each two electoral votes based on their Senate seats. That combined advantage in the Senate and the electoral college then allows Republicans to control the makeup of the Supreme Court – because justices are chosen solely by the Senate and the president. These peculiarities of the Constitution, at least in our time, have thus combined to deliver power into the hands of the minority.

Making matters worse, Republicans have used whatever tactics available, ethical or not, to increase their power: extreme gerrymandering in the House of Representatives, voter suppression, and the refusal to even consider, let alone confirm, judges nominated by Democrat presidents, a policy that has installed right-leaning judges at all levels across the country, including the Supreme Court, where its 6 to 3 conservative dominance is deeply out of step with the rest of the country.

If you’re Republican, you might think that we’re fighting a war for the future of our country and that all’s fair in love and war. But playing dirty has consequences, and the current imbalance of power, combined with Republican chicanery, has the capacity to lead our country into a very dark place.

The problem with minority rule

As I wrote this article, I tried to think of countries around the world that have recently been governed by minorities. I’m sure I’m missing some, but here are the first four that came to mind.

South Africa
Here a repressive white minority controlled a black majority. Apartheid failed miserably after decades of repression and violence. Even today, South Africa continues to be a poor country plagued by inequality, violence, and crime.

Iraq
Saddam Hussein’s Baath party, a Sunni minority, used intimidation, imprisonment, and murder to rule its Shiite and Kurdish citizens. Hussein started a pointless war with Iraq that killed half a million people, and all the above predated our post-9/11 invasion, the Sunni-Shiite Civil War, and ISIS.

Syria
Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority continues to rule Syria despite having less than 15% of the population. Assad’s brutal repression led to a Civil War starting in 2011 and continuing to this day. The war has seen the intervention of the Russian Federation, the use of bunker-busting bombs to destroy underground hospitals, and the use of nerve gas against civilian targets.

Rwanda
Yes, it gets worse. In Rwanda, the ruling Tutsi minority comprised 15% of the population. In 1994, the Hutu ethnic group, comprising 85% of the population, waged a horrific genocide against the Tutsi. Hutus slaughtered around 600,000 Tutsi, nearly all civilians, mostly with machetes.

Are we any different?

Comparing America to these countries might sound crazy to you. Each one already had a repressive government that denied basic rights to much of the population. That may be true, but you can’t deny the disturbing trend in the United States, where only 25% of the population considers itself Republican. And as that number shrinks and further threatens the right’s power base, they are much more likely to employ – and intensify – the scorched-earth tactics they’ve used over the last 30 years.

The problem will come to a head when the disenfranchised majority finds their power so compromised that no law-abiding approach has a prayer of success. They will think, “There are many more of us. Why are we letting this small group of people control our lives?” At that point, the majority will likely turn to other means of bringing about change – illegal or even violent means. And as unrest grows, the party in power typically resorts to increasingly harsh tactics to restore the rule of law. That in turn, only spurs further unrest, and we could easily find ourselves in the same downward spiral that we’ve seen in so many failed countries throughout the world.

An uncertain future

The real question is whether the majority can assert its authority within the confines of our current Constitutional system. If the majority succeeds, it can make legislative changes that put the system back into balance. But if the majority fails and the imbalance worsens, both sides will resort to increasingly dangerous tactics. We’ve already seen this happening with blue states setting up sanctuary cities for immigrants in clear violation of federal law. The practice of “nullification,” giving individual states the right to reject federal laws they oppose, helped launch the American Civil War, but this time around, it will be used by both red and blue states – on the issues of abortion, gun control, crime, voting rights, and climate change.

Whether or not this spiraling discord will lead to violence or a new civil war, I can’t predict. Neither can I claim to know how to fix the imbalance. But I do know the imbalance is growing every year, and we can’t blithely assume that time will smooth over the problem. Given our current dilemma, it seems clear to me that our response over the next 5 – 10 years will be among the most important in American history. Once again it will test, as Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”